An internationally known gifted-education center is scouting—and helping to develop—gifted students in after-school programs and pullout classes in one of Maryland’s most challenged school districts.

The injunction would have let private religious schools reopen despite the governor's order barring in-person instruction.

The latest approvals mean 12 of the 17 state plans submitted so far for Every Student Succeeds Act implementation have been given the federal go-ahead.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit turns away claims of religious discrimination by families seeking to use Maine's "tuitioning" program.

The demand for substitute teacher positions is outpacing the supply, and the quality of those applying is a concern in many places.

Teachers are using a variety of games, videos, and apps to supplement online math instruction—but not all of them are created equal.

Hawaii's schools are prepared to respond to ballistic missile threats, education officials wrote in a letter to parents after Saturday's false alarm.

Nephron Pharmaceuticals, a drug manufacturing company in West Columbia, S.C., recently hired 650 current and retired teachers through a new program designed to provide educators with additional income.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has finally OK'd Florida's plan to implement the Every Student Succeeds Act. That means that single state, plus Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, has gotten the go-ahead for its plan.

The state will be allowed to use competency-based tests developed by local and state officials, trying them out with a handful of districts in lieu of statewide tests.

The pilot, which was initially one of the most buzzed about pieces of ESSA, allows states to try out new forms of testing in a handful of districts, with the goal of eventually taking them statewide.

The justices declined to hear the appeal of the Ferguson-Florissant district over its at-large board elections, which lower courts invalidated as violating the Voting Rights Act.

That brings the number of states with approved plans to 44, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Still awaiting the OK: California, Florida, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Utah

An audit of the early-childhood education offerings in Minnesota finds complexity and fragmentation as well as a lack of data about program effectiveness.

That brings the number of states with approved plans to 44, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Still awaiting the OK: California, Florida, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Utah

The court revived a lawsuit claiming that Mississippi's lack of a "uniform" education system violates the 1868 federal law that readmitted the state to the Union.

Terris Todd, a former teacher and school administrator in the Battle Creek, Mich., schools, is the ethnic vice chair of the Michigan Republican Party.

The court declined to take up an appeal backed by school groups of a ruling allowing some property taxpayers challenge their assessments in federal court.

Early in the second half, Ohio State freshman Jaloni Cambridge went down with an apparent lower-back injury.

Yulia Lerner
Feb 23, 2011; 31:2906-2915
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

Matthew F. Glasser
Aug 10, 2011; 31:11597-11616
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

As evidence mounts that the cardiac-sympathetic nervous system reacts to challenging cognitive settings, we ask if these responses are epiphenomenal companions or if there is evidence suggesting a more intertwined role of this system with cognitive function. Healthy male and female human participants performed an approach-avoidance paradigm, trading off monetary reward for painful electric shock, while we recorded simultaneous electroencephalographic and cardiac-sympathetic signals. Participants were reward sensitive but also experienced approach-avoidance "conflict" when the subjective appeal of the reward was near equivalent to the revulsion of the cost. Drift-diffusion model parameters suggested that participants managed conflict in part by integrating larger volumes of evidence into choices (wider decision boundaries). Late alpha-band (neural) dynamics were consistent with widening decision boundaries serving to combat reward sensitivity and spread attention more fairly to all dimensions of available information. Independently, wider boundaries were also associated with cardiac "contractility" (an index of sympathetically mediated positive inotropy). We also saw evidence of conflict-specific "collaboration" between the neural and cardiac-sympathetic signals. In states of high conflict, the alignment (i.e., product) of alpha dynamics and contractility were associated with a further widening of the boundary, independent of either signal's singular association. Cross-trial coherence analyses provided additional evidence that the autonomic systems controlling cardiac-sympathetics might influence the assessment of information streams during conflict by disrupting or overriding reward processing. We conclude that cardiac-sympathetic control might play a critical role, in collaboration with cognitive processes, during the approach-avoidance conflict in humans.

Estimating the direction of functional connectivity (FC) can help further elucidate complex brain function. However, the estimation of directed FC at the voxel level in fMRI data, and evaluating its performance, has yet to be done. We therefore developed a novel directed seed-based connectivity analysis (SCA) method based on normalized pairwise Granger causality that provides greater detail and accuracy over ROI-based methods. We evaluated its performance against 145 cortical retrograde tracer injections in male and female marmosets that were used as ground truth cellular connectivity on a voxel-by-voxel basis. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was calculated for each injection, and we achieved area under the ROC curve of 0.95 for undirected and 0.942 for directed SCA in the case of high cell count threshold. This indicates that SCA can reliably estimate the strong cellular connections between voxels in fMRI data. We then used our directed SCA method to analyze the human default mode network (DMN) and found that dlPFC (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) and temporal lobe were separated from other DMN regions, forming part of the language-network that works together with the core DMN regions. We also found that the cerebellum (Crus I-II) was strongly targeted by the posterior parietal cortices and dlPFC, but reciprocal connections were not observed. Thus, the cerebellum may not be a part of, but instead a target of, the DMN and language-network. Summarily, our novel directed SCA method, visualized with a new functional flat mapping technique, opens a new paradigm for whole-brain functional analysis.

The Smithsonian Design Triennial presents 25 commissions that explore the physical and conceptual ideas of shelter and refuge

FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva today praised UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon for his support in the fight against hunger at a meeting with FAO member countries, the Committee [...]

Prince Laurent of Belgium was today appointed FAO Special Ambassador for Forests and the Environment.

The announcement was made by FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva at the Organization’s Committee on [...]

FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva today appointed Jacques Diouf as Special Envoy for the Horn of Africa and the Sahel.

In his new role, the former Director-General Jacques Diouf will [...]

Cancun, Mexico. On [...]

From the visits of Prince Charles and theGlobal Indigenous Youth Caucus (GIYC) to headquarters, to the Director-General’s ongoing visit to crisis-stricken parts of Africa, and the release of new FAO [...]

The appendix may not be as useless as commonly thought.

Christopher Gray | Smithsonian Magazine’s 2016 American Ingenuity Award Winner for Youth Achievement Christopher Gray is the founder and CEO of Scholly, the groundbreaking web and mobile app that matches current or future college students who need financial support with scholarships that can help them. Scholly has been downloaded 850,000 times and has connected college students with some $50 million in scholarships. Philadelphia-based Gray, an ABC “Shark Tank” winner and recipient of a $100,000 grant from philanthropist Steve Case’s Rise of the Rest competition, sees his digital platform as a 21st-century tool for helping countless young Americans achieve their college dreams without piling on crushing debt.

In about four billion years from now, the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will crash together Visualization: NASA, ESA, and F. Summers, STScI Simulation credit: NASA, ESA, G. Besla, Columbia University, and R. van der Marel, STScI

Zookeepers at the National Zoo keep orangutans mentally stimulated with an innovative use of iPads

"Be prepared” might not cover it when it comes to super storms.

From tumultuous love affairs to violent betrayals, the six wives of Henry VIII all left marks on the Tudor dynasty – and shaped the course of history. READ MORE about these women here: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-true-history-behind-six-the-musical-about-henry-viiis-wives-180978781/ --- For more videos from Smithsonian Magazine: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/videos/ Digital Editorial Director: Brian Wolly Supervising Producer & Scriptwriter: Michelle Mehrtens Video Editor: Sierra Theobald

Behind the scenes of Smithsonian magazine's iPad app. To learn more about the app, visit: http://www.smithsonian.com/app

Think blockbuster movie and you’ve got an idea of how this story ends

Obviously it's a bad idea to go out into space without a trusty spacesuit, but what exactly happens?

Have you ever wondered why Yellowstone is full of hot springs, bubbling mudpots and geysers like Old Faithful? In this one-minute video, Ask Smithsonian host Eric Schulze explains the supervolcano that lies beneath this national park and answers the life-or-death question: Will it erupt in a fiery inferno anytime soon?

What happens when one of the nation's largest rivers dries up? Photojournalist Pete McBride tells us about the consequences of a prolonged drought in the Colorado River, which provides drinking water and electricity to millions of Americans, and shares his experience walking the river from end to end. What can we learn from the landscape revealed by the historically low water levels, and will they become the new normal? Read “The Breathtaking Glen Canyon Reveals Its Secrets (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/glen-canyon-reveals-its-secrets-180980754/) ,” photographs & text by Pete McBride, Smithsonian, October 2022. Learn more about Pete and his work at his site (https://petemcbride.com/) . There’s More to That is a production of Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions. From the magazine, our team is Chris Klimek, Debra Rosenberg and Brian Wolly. From PRX, our team is Jessica Miller, Adriana Rosas Rivera, Genevieve Sponsler, Terence Bernardo, and Edwin Ochoa. The Executive Producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales. Episode artwork by Emily Lankiewicz. Music by APM Music.

Four decades ago, Pablo Escobar brought to his Medellín hideaway four hippopotamuses, the centerpieces of a menagerie that included llamas, cheetahs, lions, tigers, ostriches and other exotic fauna. After Colombian police shot Escobar dead in December 1993, veterinarians removed the animals—except the hippos, which were deemed too dangerous to approach. The hippos fled to the nearby Magdalena River and multiplied.  Today, the descendants of Escobar’s hippos are believed to number nearly 200. Their uncontrolled growth threatens the region’s fragile waterways. Smithsonian contributor Joshua Hammer joins us to recount this strange history and explain why Colombian conservationists have embarked upon an unusual program to sterilize these hippos in the wild via “invasive surgical castration,” a procedure that is, as he has written (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/pablo-escobar-abandoned-hippos-wreaking-havoc-colombian-jungle-180984494/) for Smithsonian magazine, “medically complicated, expensive and sometimes dangerous for hippos as well as for the people performing it.” Then, ecologist Rebecca Lewison tells us how her long-term study of hippo populations in Africa offers hints of how these creatures will continue to alter the Colombian ecosystem—and what authorities can do about it. Let us know what you think of our show, and how we can make it better, by completing our There's More to That listener survey here (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfS90zjBZ2oGa9JxVa-R5affKcOHaR2-ib1_KZeWm3HDQXJIA/viewform) . Read Josh Hammer's Smithsonian story about Escobar's hippos and their descendants here (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/pablo-escobar-abandoned-hippos-wreaking-havoc-colombian-jungle-180984494/) . Learn more about Rebecca Lewison and her work here (https://cmi.sdsu.edu/rebecca-lewison/) . Find prior episodes of our show here (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/podcast/) . There’s More to That is a production of Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions. From the magazine, our team is Chris Klimek, Debra Rosenberg and Brian Wolly. From PRX, our team is Jessica Miller, Adriana Rosas Rivera, Genevieve Sponsler, Rye Dorsey, and Edwin Ochoa. The Executive Producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales. Fact-checking by Stephanie Abramson. Episode artwork by Emily Lankiewicz  Music by APM Music.

Two titans of the era went head-to-head in a heated race for the presidency. The stakes were high. The very future of a young nation hung in the balance. Join us as we explore the revolutionary ideas that shaped this critical moment in American democracy. --- For more videos from Smithsonian Magazine: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/videos/ Digital Editorial Director: Brian Wolly Supervising Producer & Scriptwriter: Michelle Mehrtens Video Editor: Sierra Theobald

Put your hands together for our host, Eric Schulze, as he dives into history to answer your questions.

A local fisherman talks about the uncertain future facing locals when the new bridge connecting Peru and Brazil is completed

Unexplored iron-rich magma could help power current and future technologies